Warm-ish and clear-ish today, but hopefully more clear than yesterday. It was overcast most of the day with misty drizzle in the afternoon- which happened just as I got set up to cut the grass in the back yard- which has become a haven for possum. One dead little one under the potting bench day before yesterday with the big live one in my lawnmower cabinet, led to one big one on the top shelf of my patio grocery store yesterday.
The dog was sure he had the invader well schooled, but I didn’t want the giant rat-looking thing up with my food… he was disinclined to leave however. So I brought the dog indoors and waited. Checked on mister nasty-smell later and he’d tucked himself into the box of instant mashed potatoes. I don’t think he ate any, but Senor Raton had nibbled off the corner, providing an entry point. Nothing but naked nasty tail sticking out of the box as a giveaway… Picked up the box and put it up on the back fence. Hope he takes it as the eviction it was intended to be.
Possums are a beneficial animal, but they are ugly bastages.
So, all in all, very little cleaning actually got done yesterday, after the cleaning service postponed their visit to Wednesday.
I did get some garage cleaning done, very little mind you, but some. And I put some stuff away in the house, and, and, and…
But I mostly researched septic systems. Today I’ll call a guy that covers the area around my BOL and I’ll probably have to go up and meet him. Then it will be a process of managing the sequencing so that foundation repair/retaining wall guy and septic install guy don’t have to undo or redo work. Since I’ve clearly got to do a site survey/ site plan to show the septic guy, I took a (not particularly brief) dive down the rabbit hole of point cloud elevation data, topo mapping, and 3d modelling of same. I wanted a high resolution something that I could download and base my site survey off of without measuring everything myself. What I got was not much more than I started with. There is a LIDAR survey of the lake and surrounds, and it has a 1m resolution, far better than the USGS survey’s 10m resolution.
But I can’t figure out how to get just a part of the dataset to use, and even with 1m resolution, the points aren’t that close together. I guess I’ll be out there with a tape measure after all.
Finger feels better, but my back is as sore as some sort of really sore sore thing… jab in the butt made me sit and walk funny. And not in a Ministry of Funny Walks kind of funny, not at all. Hope the swelling goes down today.
I’ve got a couple of things to pick up, some calls to make, and some stuff to organize. After all, we’re just turning rapidly de-valuing fiat currency into hard goods and infrastructure for the future safety and security of my family. I just was hoping to not have to hook the bank ATM directly to the wood chipper and turn it all to 11…
Stack it all, but especially the things you can’t live without. Like antibiotics. Like pain meds. Like appropriate reference books. And the wisdom to know when to use what, and what for.
N
Nick
my late dad was a civil engineer who specialized in septic systems. If you could figure out the firm that did the original work and they still exist they might have a copy of the design. Dad had to file copies with the local government so maybe the county there has a copy. It was Illinois where he worked with numerous local villages, townships, etc versus Texas though.
@steve mac, thanks! I'll call the helpful county clerk today and see if they have anything. They might, and it might have been built to plan…
That's one of the things we are sure to lose with all the digitization. Words and drawings on paper are still readable 50, 100, 1000 years later, but file formats and digital media don't last. In my non-prepping hobby people do historical research looking at factory ledgers, published articles of incorporation, news media, diaries, and state and county records. They are able to reconstruct an enormous amount of information and the day to day operation of companies that are now defunct. Even companies that merged, grew, sold, etc but are still going concerns have a lack of historical information, and they KEPT all the stuff. Something as simple as "how many objects were made or sold?" or "when were they stamping this serial number on items?" are very difficult to determine only 100 years later.
Future historians, amateur and professional, will look at the dawn of the digital age as the fire in the Library of Alexandria… nothing but hints of what was lost will remain.
n
I had an interesting conversation with one of the neighbor, a long-time resident, a few weeks ago. Motorola used to have a large campus up at this end of town also, probably the inspiration for the new Apple campus, with surgical precision boundaries just outside the city limits for the buildings but still making the city responsible for road improvements.
Another factoid from the neighbor, strictly anectdotal, was that Steve Jobs vowed never to put money into Austin, and the old campus, inherited from Power Computing, was originally a set of one story buildings similar to the neighboring Oracle facility.
Once Steve died, however, things changed.
PDF, XLS, and Word 6 DOC aren't going anywhere, but the big issue with digitization is that a lot of the work is manual, tedious, and, in the US, gets done by lowest bid labor, often with a third world attitude towards the effort. "Why bother? Just a bunch of dead white people."
In theory, my wife's former office in Florida should have digitized all of their records about 12-13 years ago, but, every now and then, both at the house and wherever she's working here, we'll get inquiries, sometimes court summons, looking for medical records which aren't in the old employer's system. Someone who should have been responsible to the point of being fired for mistakes is rebuffing inquiries about missing records with the response, "The doctor took the records with her to Texas. Go ask her."
Yes, my wife committed hundreds of Federal felonies. The crazy thing is that lawyers believe the office staff member and don't push into the documentation handling of what was and still is one of the largest group practices in the region.
Always print out your block chain ledger on good paper, place in vault.
The pr0n! The pr0n!
The pr0n will be fine. The inept algorithm behind DVD security, designed by Warner Bros. studio lawyers according to legend, has probably ensured that format's survival for a long time since the physcial media is fairly durable, resolution adequate, and even amateur-level production on a mass scale extremely easy.
According to Optics Planet, it's .45 ACP Day.
Did I mention that my finger is back to its normal color, only slightly swollen, and only sore on the actual puncture?
Gotta love antibiotics. Even if they are a colon cleanser.
n
To "uncleanse" your colon, take probiotics. They have other positive health benefits.
I forgot to add that the weakness for DVD (or any similar disc technology) is the player hardware, specifically the laser. I just pulled an almost 20 year-old CD-R out of storage to load Windows XP, and while the media tests fine, the decade-old reader in the PC is caput.
Keeping disc media viable requires a tehnological infrastructure capable of producing semiconductor lasers.
Ah, what battlespace prep is this?
https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/food/2022/03/25/food-expiration-dates-best-by-safety-quality/7147028001/
–actual article is paywalled. Makes you go hmmm.
H/T Adaptive Curmudgeon
n
We kept eggs in the bilges for ~90 days. Call it 45F. Some of them went bad toward the end, mostly those with hairline cracks.
Canned and jarred food is good nearly forever as long as the seal is good.
Grains good until the bugs hatch?
Oils and fats do go rancid and I don't trust milk after it's date.
I just got my umpteenth alert from the State Department: "Don't travel to Belize due to high crime." I've gotten at least a hundred alerts during the last 3 years.
Does Belize suck that bad? I know it is connected to Mexico so crooks can move freely back and forth.
While I was employed at the bank in San Antonio auditors were common. One group demanded that the bank keep year end transaction history tapes for 100 years. We had hundreds in storage. All written on 6500 BPI GCR encoded tapes in EBCDIC format in Burroughs LOADMP format.
I asked the auditor in what Fairyland futuristic medieval time zone would anyone have equipment to read or software to access those tapes in 50 years? He just shrugged and said it was a federal retention requirement.
The bank also had thousands of microfiche stored in the basement. On archival film that was good for 200 years. I have not seen a fiche reader in years but at least the technology to view them is not complicated. If the person can find the fiche. They were stored by year, then by account number.
If I was looking for a transaction I could probably guess the year. But certainly not the account number. It would require looking through several thousands of fiche pages.
When I retired my mortgage there was no deed given to me, no paperwork at all. Just recorded at the county courthouse.
That's one way to lose weight.
I looked in BIOS on the off chance I somehow disabled USB. I didn't.
I opened the box yesterday and cleaned out the dust. It wasn't bad. Not the silt-like stuff on the top of the refrigerator –kind of fluffy.
I pulled and re-seated the various connectors. No USB for me.
Another problem is waking from sleep. It mostly works but sometimes with no video. Power cycle and Wind7 resumes… sometimes normally, sometimes with no mouse or keyboard (both PS/2).
Ok. Now to disable USB in BIOS and see if that fixes my wake from sleep problem. If not, new PC for me.
It's due to that Burner Phone with the country of code of Mexico that you have been using.
Food preservation by canning was developed to win a prize from Napoleon. The objective was to keep food stores for the army.
If the short window stamped on modern can goods was accurate the prize would not have been awarded.
Acidic foods will last indefinitely if the seal is intact. Who knows how long a can of baked beans will last?
Eggs in sound shells last longer if unwashed and unfertilized. 30 days at room temp (<75) should be no problem. Refrigerated 6 months.
Butter can be frozen and keeps for months if clarified first.
Johnson Smith used to sell surplus IBM handheld fiche readers as a gag item with, IIRC, a miniaturized copy of the Bible.
My science teacher in elementary school had the kit. Totally useless, but more interesting than other Johnson Smith go to items like rubber dog doo or fake vomit.
The company was based in Sarasota from ~ mid 80s on. They even had an outlet store for a while, but, sadly, everything ended a few years ago.
LOL! I had the fake vomit and dog doo as a child. Throw in a Whoopi Goldberg Cushion for good measure.
Rick, 500 error browsing to the site's home page.
Approximately 1737 EDT, originating IP address 74.109.177.70
@SteveF – there was an upgrade to WP going on about then. Maybe related?
I made fake dog poop, vomit, and snot with my son and nephew, aged maybe 4 and 10. They loved it, of course. We packaged some to mail to my other nephew. Soooo, a few days later I got a call from a very irate man with the post office. They'd apparently ignored the FRAGILE markings all and stuck the package into some sorter which pressed it hard enough to get past the inner cardboard and squish the fake snot out. He demanded to know whether it was any kind of toxic material (it wasn't; metamucil, water, and food coloring) and threatened me with charges of destruction of federal property and something else. I didn't cower before his threats (I mean, duh) and eventually he hung up and nothing else was heard of it.
>> LOL! I had the fake vomit and dog doo as a child. Throw in a Whoopi Goldberg Cushion for good measure.
Don't forget the palm 'shocker,' now that shaking hands has returned. I seem to remember two years ago someone (Fauxi?) predicting it would be elbow bumps only forever.
@Rick, when you do a fast scroll down a floating Up arrow appears, however for the reverse scenario there's no floating Down arrow. If not difficult perhaps a future to-do item? Thanks.
@SteveF
You should have asked him why your package didn't get the service you paid for. The whole justification for the existence of an obscenely inflated "First Class Package" rate is that packages–as defined by USPS–are not compatible with their precious mis-designed mail sorters. But they upcharge you and then run packages through the sorters anyway.
The floating up arrow is not a part of the theme, nor in any plugin. Used to have one, but I was unsupported, so removed it a while ago. I don't see it on my laptop.
Maybe it's an add-in to your browser? There are add-ins for Firefox and Chrome that do that.
Finishing up final testing of the new theme – an update to the one here. The main new feature is the upgrade to the CKEditor5 for the comment box. Should work much better with phones. Not much change to the visual look of the site, but lots of work in the back end.
I put it on my SecurityDawg site – my site that contains the occasional ramblings relating to computer security and programming. Posts happen 'not very often', but they are excellent, if I do say so myself. <heh>
I've done a lot of testing on my private development site, and all was well. There will be some final testing of the theme on the SecurityDawg site tomorrow, including adding a new post. Absent any issuesl, I will upgrade the theme here.
Made a Costco run today – got the usual rotisserie chicken, and filled up the Highlander with gas – $4.25/gallon. It gets about 24.3 mpg, even on the long trips with the wheelchair lift on the back (adds about 200 pounds). Comfortable to drive.
Down to just the Highlands. Since we moved to WA 7 years ago and retired, there wasn't much need for a 2nd car. (It was literally only driven to church on Sundays.) So put a new set of tires on it (the current ones had 'expired', even though there was lots of tread), an oil change, and gave it to my daughter for her commute car.